Officer shortages, misconduct case backlog keep Baltimore Police under federal oversight

U.S. District Judge James Bredar on Monday lauded the Baltimore Police Department’s progress under its consent decree but said he couldn’t release the agency from federal supervision unless it addressed persistent officer shortages and overhauled its system for disciplining officers.

While “very substantial progress has been made on a number of fronts,” Bredar said the department had so far come up short on two critical issues imperiling the city’s ability to get out from under federal oversight.

At a quarterly public meeting on the judge’s oversight of the department, Police Commissioner Richard Worley agreed that BPD was lacking on both fronts. But he also expressed optimism that it could correct course and come out from under federal oversight by the end of 2028.

Bredar lamented that the department remains about 500 officers short of the 2,570 recommended in its staffing plan. He credited the agency with having “stopped the bleeding” that led to a low point of fewer than 2,000 officers about two years ago, but nonetheless said he was concerned.

“We’ve been in this space now, between 2,050 and 2,100, and I have concerns that we have stalled out,” the judge said.

Bredar said the shortage is hampering the department’s ability to rebuild community trust because the effort requires officers to have time to engage residents beyond emergency calls.

Bredar approved an agreement in 2017 between the city and the federal Justice Department to correct decades of unconstitutional policing after the death of Freddie Gray, who died from injuries sustained in police custody.

On Monday, the judge said he was also concerned that the use of overtime to cover staffing shortages is costly and potentially dangerous when officers are fatigued from working too many hours.

“We need sharp, engaged, well-rested police officers on the street,” he said.

In response, Worley said the Police Department was trying to bolster its ranks by changing its recruiting, “which was broken for about a year.” The agency was starting a program to hire officers from other agencies, rather than hiring only cadets. The commissioner said he recently approved ads recruiting officers to run in New York City’s subway system.

This year, the department is projected to hire fewer officers than it did last year. Maj. Albert DellaRocco, who leads the department’s recruiting, said the agency averages 16 new hires per month but loses 15 officers over the same period.

DellaRocco also said the agency adjusted its physical agility test, which about two-thirds of prospective women applicants were failing.

“We’re trying to find that sweet spot that makes the most sense to not prevent people from becoming police officers but also to make sure we have applicants who can successfully complete the academy,” DellaRocco said.

Exacerbating the department’s officer shortage is its “failure” to discipline officers in a timely fashion, Bredar said.

There is currently a backlog of more than 900 internal misconduct cases awaiting trial boards, which determine officer discipline. Bredar said that means a “substantial number” of the agency’s 2,070 officers have the potential for discipline looming over them.

Bredar, who does a police ride-along every month, said he recently encountered an officer who got in trouble for a verbal disagreement with a supervisor. It took almost two years for that officer’s misconduct case to be resolved, Bredar said.

Deputy City Solicitor Stephen Salsbury told Bredar that the department was on pace to hold more than 100 trial boards in 2026, five times as many as it did in 2025, but conceded the process for doling out officer discipline was “wholly inadequate.”

A 2022 Maryland law that overhauled officer discipline entitled officers to a disciplinary board consisting of an administrative law judge, a civilian and an officer of equal rank. Though the Baltimore Police Department has hired additional administrative law judges, the process is still not moving quickly enough to clear the backlog, Salsbury said.

He said the city was working with its state legislative delegation to introduce changes to the law that would allow minor disciplinary cases, those punishable by a written reprimand or a day’s suspension, to be heard exclusively by an administrative law judge.

Chief Olufemi Akanni, head of the Police Department’s public integrity bureau, said internal affairs detectives were completing their investigations in an average of 214 days.

That officers were waiting much longer than that for a resolution of their cases dismayed Bredar, who implored officials to act quickly or risk holding up the rest of the department’s consent decree progress.

“I can’t sign off on an internal affairs process that has this kind of structural deficiency,” the judge said.